Fault tolerant model for data dissemination in wireless sensor networks

Reliable event detection at the sink is based on collective information provided by source nodes and not on any individual report. Reliable data gathering and transmission are important in wireless sensor networks. While node redundancy in WSNs, increases the fault tolerance, no guarantees on reliability levels can be assured. Furthermore, the frequent node or other physical failures within WSNs impact the observed reliability over time and make that reliability models don’t work properly in data transmission protocols. Many frameworks for modeling reliability of data transport protocols in WSNs are currently exist but don’t satisfy the reliable data transmission. The existence of such a framework would simplify evaluation and comparison of protocols. This paper formulates the problem of data transport in a WSN as a set of operations with reliability block diagram. The operations aim at filtering the raw data to streamline its reliable transport towards the sink. Based on this formulation we systematically define a reliability framework and compare the reliability of existing data transmission protocols (ESRT, RMST) with this new framework.